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  • The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton by J. P. E. Harper-Scott
  • Luca Lévi Sala
The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton. By J. P. E. Harper-Scott. (Music in Context.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. [xxii, 277 p. ISBN 9780521765213. $103.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

As we can understand from a first glance at the subtitle, the aim of this complex three-part book seems to be to deepen discussion about how, for instance, William Walton’s “reactionary music” can actually become an example of a “revolutionary kernel” (p. 147), able to reconstruct or define a new idea of musical modernism, whose edges could be chronologically re-extended and significantly reevaluated. Thus it will be possible to redefine and establish “new ideological” quilting points, renewed aesthetic standards “to supplant neoliberalism” (p. 252).

In the first part of the book (“A ruthless criticism of everything existing”), Harper-Scott’s aim is to outline how it is possible to redefine modernism as not a single and unique aesthetic entity but as a set of structures of widely differing ideologies. Thus, music history’s classification of what is or is not modernist has to be viewed as a political act, not only an aesthetic judgment for the purposes of categorization (i.e. straining to fit works into well-defined and “invisible” frozen sections). The task is to widen the focus on the aesthetics of music, since only in that way will it be possible to define new methodologies of wide-spectrum musicological analysis. Trying not to hide behind simplistic or unique aesthetic reformulations, Harper-Scott’s goals and preconditions are designed to “deepen our understanding of the dialectical nature of the modernism” (p. xiii), by clearly politically engaging himself in “showing how modernist music . . . helps to advance our most pressing present concern—to escape the horrors of the present by imagining the transformation of a coming society” (p. xiv). In this light, the reinterpretation and “on loan” handling of Alain Badiou’s theories of “truth” become the foremost methods for approaching modernism, exposing and suggesting the use of heavyweight theoretical models. The author presents the idea that “modernism must encompass all music of the 20th century, and not only a privileged group of composers” (p. xiv) as a new model of cooperative theorization. We could ask: how can we perceive the conservatism in Walton’s “reactionary” music as the expression (on the contrary), of something of the sociopolitical revolutionary, the illustration of a more forward-thinking and sophisticated analysis? How do we broaden the limits of musical modernism beyond the post-ideological [End Page 710] era? Harper-Scott begins by sharply critiquing Taruskin’s scholarly approach, reproaching him as the paradigm of a clearly “anti-modernist musicology” (p. 185), actually able to “erase” (p. 5) modernism as a late wave of romanticism, as a closed residual extension of a “marketized” consumer-oriented and “reactive” bourgeoisie. According to Harper-Scott, Taruskin’s analysis consciously centers around the New World, postmodernist, simplistic vision in relationship with the old Continental tradition, limiting and reducing what is actually a multifaceted European stratification in musical expression (p. 6). The polemic gradually strengthens, attacking what in Harper-Scott’s conception is a “xenophobic-capitalist quilting point” (p. 5), as well as an exclusive, capitalist-oriented imagining, a neither objective nor unprejudiced formulation that probably deserves, in Harper-Scott’s aim, a more accomplished and nuanced discussion (p. 9). This critique of Taruskin’s ideas is perhaps justified and thoughtful, but it occasionally becomes too extensive and overpowering and seems to be a rather virulent review of an American way of thinking (and what about Pasler, Bartlett, Turino, for instance?). The argument would benefit from more explicit examples; the examples given are not clear or strong enough to support and defend his views (pp. 10–20), and he would have done well to disconnect from or “resolve” issues pertaining to the fourth of Taruskin’s volumes in The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). The risk here is that the analysis of quilting points of a two-centuries-long...

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